The legalization of YouTube?

Apparently being acquired for $1.65 billion is good news and bad news for YouTube. As for the latter, there's the ongoing copyright battle, apparently leading to the deletion of tens of thousands of video clips from TV shows, the next challenge being X-rated video, no doubt. But the big news at this point is YouTube's purging of video from Comedy Central, including clips from "YouTube stalwarts like 'The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,' 'The Colbert Report' and 'South Park'," the New York Times reports. "A week earlier, nearly 30,000 clips of TV shows, movies and music videos were taken down after the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers cited copyright infringement." Who knows what these purges will do to the "People's Republic of YouTube," as the Los Angeles Times recently put it in an in-depth article on this "great leap forward in the democratization of pop culture." Will the Google acquisition shut down this latest iteration "people power"? Examples from the L.A. Times: "The best-known gotcha YouTube post came from an Indian American student tailing U.S. Sen. George Allen (R-Va.). The student recently captured an irritated Allen pointing him out and telling his supporters, 'Let's give a welcome to macaca here - welcome to America.' The slur prompted a tsunami of media coverage that sent Allen's campaign into a tailspin. Another popular series of clips shows U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) on the campaign trail, joshing about his Guatemalan gardener and struggling to stay awake during a Senate hearing." Or does it not even matter, as Steve Maich (I'm thinking the next Clifford Stoll-style Net critic), a senior editor at Canada's Macleans magazine, suggests at length in ""Pornography, gambling, lies, theft and terrorism: The Internet sucks." BTW, Comedy Central clips reappeared on YouTube after their owner Viacom signed a deal with YouTube, a media blog reported two days after the Times piece appeared. [MySpace, too, is cracking down on copyright infringement. It announced this week it would block copyrighted music and videos from being uploaded to user profiles, the BBC reports.]